


Windblown

by sdwolfpup



Category: Hard Core Logo
Genre: Gen, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, None - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-14
Updated: 2007-05-14
Packaged: 2018-07-19 21:19:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7377781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sdwolfpup/pseuds/sdwolfpup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> When John was young – a duckling, a chick, an egg – he knew how to fly.  </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Windblown

**Author's Note:**

> **Quote:** 142\. I am a feather for each wind that blows. - _A Winter’s Tale, II. iii._  
> 
> 
>  **A/N:** Written for [](http://ds-shakespeare.livejournal.com/profile)[**ds_shakespeare**](http://ds-shakespeare.livejournal.com/). Many, many heaps of thanks to [](http://brynnmck.livejournal.com/profile)[**brynnmck**](http://brynnmck.livejournal.com/) and [](http://sansets.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://sansets.livejournal.com/)**sansets**. They both read multiple versions of this and provided pointed, thoughtful feedback. Y’all are awesome. I’m grateful.

When John was young – a duckling, a chick, an egg – he knew how to fly.

Fast and far, turn on a wing, run across a parking lot, go further than anyone else he knew. Far enough to escape from the people, places, voices that squawked and chirped in his head, that never shut up. But he never knew where to go. He just went: two times around in a circle and then straight from wherever he stopped. Music was his guideline, the thread he followed back home every night after he’d sailed whatever wind had picked him up.

Eventually he started tumbling, falling. The earth was long and wide beneath him, filling his sight, unyielding stone that didn’t give way even in his dreams. He wanted to fly again, but he only tumbled to the ground. He skinned his knees on the asphalt, his heart on the breasts of a girl named Alice, his head on the railing of the electroshock bed. They clipped his wings in the asylum so he wouldn’t bang into the windows trying to get free. It was still here, quiet. There was never any wind.

When he met Billy for the first time - he was William Boisy then - John was trying to believe he’d never known how to fly, just walk, like a penguin- a _human_ he reminded himself. He had always been a boy, never a bird. They were in the yard, standing on the green grass, where they’d bumped into each other. John stared up into the sky.

“Why’re you here?” Billy asked first.

“I couldn’t stop falling.”

Billy gave him a look like he was crazy. John laughed. Billy tapped out a song on his thigh. They spent the afternoon talking guitars and the best strings, how to set up the amp, how to bring down a room.

“I’m renting myself,” Billy said a day later. It was raining outside, tapping against the glass like woodpeckers at a tree, like thin fingers on old jeans. They were sitting in front of the turned-off television, watching themselves in its reflection.

“Like a house?” John asked.

Billy had laughed this time. “Like a prostitute. Except instead of dicks, I get needles stuck in me.”

John looked at him; saw the blond hair, the cool eyes. Billy could have been a hawk, a falcon. He had angles and talons. Billy glanced around the room and pulled a small bag out of his pocket. John felt like a mouse now, staring into the sun.

“Why’re you here?” Billy asked him again.

“I don’t remember,” John said.

“I’ve got this friend,” Billy had said. He held out the baggie, there were seeds in it. “We’re starting a band.” John stuck his hand in the bag, pulled out a smooth, round shape. Billy grinned at him. The wind brushed John’s cheeks.

They said goodbye on the lawn again. It was wet beneath John’s slippers. “Give me a call when you get out of here,” Billy had said, pressing a piece of paper into John’s hand. “Try not to let them, you know,” he made a circling motion with his finger pointed at his head like a gun. John didn’t know what Billy meant, but he nodded. They both laughed.

It rained for a week after Billy left, turning the green grass into mud, dirtying everything. Walking was messier than flying, and harder. John kept tripping; he fell into the sky once until the doctors dragged him back down. When the sun rose the next day, he had forgotten how to sing.

A year later, John told the doctors he’d never been a bird at all; he had arms, not wings. He never fell anymore; his feet never left the ground. They released him into the wild. Billy - Billy Tallent - was waiting for him by an old van, a blue van, blue like the sky, like the sea. John thought maybe he was a fish now, but his fingers didn’t feel like flippers. Billy smiled a shark’s smile, but he hugged John in front of the van and his arms were like clouds.

Billy talked the whole drive, because John had forgotten how, and he took them to a neighborhood filled with ravens and vultures. Billy introduced John to Joe Dick. Joe wasn’t any sort of creature at all. He was a tornado, a hurricane, full of sound and fury. He swept John up, in, away the moment John picked up a guitar and his fingers curled into claws. John couldn’t speak anymore, but he remembered how to sing, like a bird should.

In storms like this, John knew birds were like ships, dashed on the rocks, looking for a lighthouse. The only lighthouse visible from the middle of Joe’s storm were notes and chords, the clench of fingers on the frets and the ringing in John’s ears an hour after the concert while some groupie sucked him off. These winds never stopped, they slammed him into the ground and then lifted him back up, forcing him onward.

John looked everywhere in the wind for Billy Boisy, but all he found was Billy Tallent, who had never learned to fly. Pipe may have been a rock, a stone, immovable even by Joe Dick, but Billy fell, kept falling, and John tried not to fall, too, even when the ground seemed endless beneath him, like an ocean of dirt. The storm raged all around. John flapped his wings, surged against the wind and dreamt of clear skies.

It was like screaming into the thunder. But at least he could fly. 


End file.
